Rank Order of JIRA Plan impacted by moving story into Kanban To Do

Question

I've had a strange experience when I moved a story into the to-do status on multiple JIRA Kanban boards. When a story is sent to the to-do status, JIRA then sends that story to the bottom of the JIRA plan it is associated with. When I move it back to the backlog, it returns to the ranking before the move in the plan.

Does anyone have thoughts on where the board's configuration is off, causing the rank to be impacted when a story is moved from one status to another?

Tiffanie Penley · Answer

I think Garrett & I figured this out and I wanted to share.

The status being used, "To-Do" had an "In Progress" status category. So when he moved tickets from the Backlog "not in progress status category", and into the "To-Do" "In Progress status category, it was changing the priority/rank, which would cause it to change rank on the plan.

Once we moved his workflow to using a "To Do" status with a status category of "To Do," the rank change stopped happening.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

When you are using the drag-and-drop method it is possible to change the rank of the issue depending on where you drop it in the list of issues. If you look at the three images below you can see a blue line appearing in column based on where the issue I am dragging (TKA-131) will be dropped.

Where I end up dropping the issue will determine the issue's rank relative to the issues displayed. The only ways that I know of to ensure the rank is not changed are:

- to change the issue status by modifying the Status field rather than drag-and-drop

- or ensure that the user doing the drag-and-drop does not have the Rank Issue permission (in a Company Managed project). I don't see Rank Issue as an explicit permission in Team Managed projects.

Garrett Polifka · Answer

It is a team-managed project that is a part of a larger organization.

Sorry, I can not provide a screenshot because of sensitive content on the board.

The issue occurred when I moved a story from the backlog to a status by dragging it into the to-do area of the Kanban board. It also seems to have happened when moving a story across columns on the kanban board.

In my most recent test, it did not seem to effect the positioning in the plan if I selected the status from the tickets drop down.

Looking at the history of the ticket, it appears that when it is moved through a drag, it is also ranked higher as a part of that move. If I do it through the ticket, it does not adjust the rank with status change.

Could there be a configuration that is changing rank when the status is updated through manual drang?